Pics: Your Phone Is a Bacteria Playground!

Germaphobes be warned! Your cell phone is potentially the most disgusting germ spreading device of all time. Don’t take our word for it geeks, the folks over at the University of Surrey found some disease carrying bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus after reviewing the nasties after just three days of research.

Dr Simon Park, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology, said:

“As part of a course called Practical and Biomedical Bacteriology, an undergraduate module that I run, I get the students to imprint their mobile phones onto bacteriological growth Petri dishes so that we might determine what they might carry. It’s unusual but very effective way of engaging our students with the often overlooked microbiology of everyday life”

“The ecological niche on the body for Staphylococcus aureus is the nostrils, so a furtive pick of the nose, and quick text after, and you end up with this pathogen on your smartphone

“You can clearly see the outline of the phone on this, but the whole plate is covered by the spreading growth of a bacterium called Bacillus mycoides. This pattern of growth is unique to this bacterium and because soil is its natural habitat, we know that this phone or its user had recently been in contact with soil. Each phone tells a story

From these results, it seems that the mobile phone doesn’t just remember telephone numbers, but also harbours a history of our personal and physical contacts such as other people, soil and other matter.”